Charon's Ferryman

Lore & Background

Greek and Roman literary sources from the 5th century BC through the 2nd century AD are consistent in attributing four characteristics to Charon's obol: it is a single, low-denomination coin; it is placed in the mouth; the placement occurs at the time of death; it represents a boat fare. The coin for Charon is conventionally referred to in Greek literature as an obolós (ὀβολός), one of the basic denominations of ancient Greek coinage, worth one-sixth of a drachma. Among the Greeks, coins in actual burials are sometimes also a danakē (δανάκη) or other relatively small-denomination gold, silver, bronze or copper coin in local use. In Roman literary sources the coin is usually bronze or copper. The payment is sometimes specified with a term for "boat fare" (in Greek naulon ναῦλον, Latin naulum); "fee for ferrying" (porthmeion πορθμήϊον or πορθμεῖον); or "waterway toll" (Latin portorium). The satirist Lucian has Charon himself, in a dialogue of the same name, declare that he collects "an obol from everyone who makes the downward journey."

In Their Own Story

The poet Callimachus notes the custom of carrying the porthmēïon as a "ferryman's fee" in the "parched mouths of the dead." In an elegy of consolation spoken in the person of the dead woman, the Augustan poet Propertius expresses the finality of death by her payment of the bronze coin to the infernal toll collector (portitor). Often, an author uses the low value of the coin to emphasize that death makes no distinction between rich and poor; all must pay the same because all must die, and a rich person can take no greater amount into death: "My luggage is only a flask, a wallet, an old cloak, and the obol that pays the passage of the departed." The incongruity of paying what is, in effect, admission to Hell encouraged a comic or satiric treatment. Aristophanes makes jokes about the fee in his comic catabasis The Frogs, and a character complains that Theseus must have introduced it, characterizing the Athenian hero in his role of city organizer as a bureaucrat. Lucian satirizes the obol in his essay "On Funerals": "So thoroughly are people taken in by all of this that when one of the family dies, immediately they bring an obol and put it into his mouth to pay the ferryman for setting him over, without considering what sort of coinage is customary and current in the lower world and whether it is the Athenian or the Macedonian or the Aeginetan obol that is legal tender there." In another satirical work of Lucian, the "Dialogs of the dead", a character called Menippus has just died and Charon is asking for an obol in order to convey him across the river to the underworld, Menippus refuses to pay the obol, and consequently to enter the world of the dead claiming that: "You can’t get blood out of a stone" — literally, "You can't get [any obols] from one who doesn't have any."

Reader's Guide

Archaeology shows that the myth reflects an actual custom, but the placement of coins with the dead was neither pervasive nor confined to a single coin in the deceased's mouth. Among the ancient Greeks, only about 5 to 10 percent of known burials contain any coins at all; in some Roman cremation cemeteries, however, as many as half the graves yield coins. Many if not most of these occurrences conform to the myth of Charon's obol in neither the number of coins nor their positioning. Variety of placement and number, including but not limited to a single coin in the mouth, is characteristic of all periods and places. Coins are found in Greek burials by the 5th century BC, as soon as Greece was monetized, and appear throughout the Roman Empire into the 5th century AD, with examples conforming to the Charon's obol type as far west as the Iberian Peninsula, north into Britain, and east to the Vistula river in Poland. The jawbones of skulls found in certain burials in Roman Britain are stained greenish from contact with a copper coin. In many burials, inscribed metal-leaf tablets or exonumia take the place of the coin, or gold-foil crosses during the early Christian period. The presence of coins or a coin-hoard in Germanic ship-burials suggests an analogous concept. In Latin, Charon's obol sometimes is called a viaticum, or "sustenance for the journey"; the placement of the coin on the mouth has been explained also as a seal to protect the deceased's soul or to prevent it from returning.

Did You Know?

• Greek and Latin literary sources from the 5th century BC through the 2nd century AD consistently specify the coin as an obol, worth one-sixth of a drachma.
• Among the ancient Greeks, only about 5 to 10 percent of known burials contain any coins at all.
• The satirist Lucian has Charon declare he collects 'an obol from everyone who makes the downward journey.'
• In Latin, Charon's obol is sometimes called a viaticum, meaning 'sustenance for the journey,' and ecclesiastical Latin later borrowed the term for the Eucharist placed in the mouth of a dying person.
• The jawbones of skulls found in certain burials in Roman Britain are stained greenish from contact with a copper coin.